SMEmail - A New Protocol for the Secure E-mail in Mobile Environments

TL;DR

SMEmail introduces a lightweight, elliptic curve-based secure email protocol tailored for resource-constrained mobile devices, enhancing confidentiality, integrity, and authentication over traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper presents SMEmail, a novel application-layer protocol that provides comprehensive security features using elliptic curve cryptography suitable for mobile environments.

Findings

Provides secure email with confidentiality and integrity

Uses elliptic curve cryptography for efficiency

Suitable for resource-limited mobile devices

Abstract

The electronic mail plays an unavoidable role in the humankind communications. With the great interest for the connection via mobile platforms, and the growing number of vulnerabilities and attacks, it is essential to provide suitable security solutions regarding the limitations of resource restricted platforms. Although some solutions such as PGP and S/MIME are currently available for the secure e-mail over the Internet, they are based on traditional public key cryptography that involves huge computational costs. In this paper, a new secure application-layer protocol, called SMEmail, is introduced that provides several security attributes such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, non-repudiation, and forward secrecy of message confidentiality for the electronic mails. SMEmail offers an elliptic curve-based public key solution that uses public keys for the secure key establishment of a symmetric encryption, and is so suitable for the resource restricted platforms such as mobile phones.